[BARRY]
The blue lightning hit the intersection before he heard it.
He was halfway through a left turn at full speed — chasing a meta down Powell Boulevard at three in the afternoon with traffic that he was politely weaving — and the light at the intersection changed color. Not red to green. Yellow to blue. A blue that didn't belong to the spectrum of any traffic signal anyone had ever installed.
Then Barry was on his back in the middle of Powell.
He didn't remember being hit.
The sky above him was the wrong color, too — not the clean sky of a second ago, but a sky with a man-shaped hole in it that was descending toward him at a speed his vision couldn't track. His brain handed him get up and his body produced about a third of get up before the man-shaped hole was on the pavement next to him and a hand was around his throat.
"Hello."
The mask had no eyes. Just a black hole where a face should be.
Barry tried to move.
The hand on his throat lifted him off the ground like he weighed nothing. His feet kicked at air. He tried to vibrate — the trick he'd taught himself to slip out of a hold — and the man-shaped hole was already vibrating with him, matching, frequency for frequency, locking him in place.
"Show me your speed."
Barry tried.
He poured everything he had at the man.
He punched and the punch landed and the man absorbed it and the man's hand around Barry's throat tightened a fraction.
"More."
Barry's second punch landed with his whole weight behind it.
The man's head moved an inch.
"Disappointing."
Then the world was a blur of motion that wasn't Barry's. He was being carried at speed through downtown Central City. Buildings strobed past. His own scream was outpacing him by half a city block. He saw — between the moments he could see — a glass storefront, the side of a bus, a fountain, a row of news cameras gathered around an unrelated event that he was being dragged across the foreground of.
The press cameras clicked.
The man-shaped hole stopped.
Lifted Barry over his head.
Brought him down across his knee.
Something inside Barry's back made a sound he heard with his bones, not his ears.
Pain that he'd never had vocabulary for arrived and stayed.
The mask leaned down close.
"This," it said, in a voice that was a wet machine, "is your hero."
The cameras were still clicking when the hand let him drop onto the steps of the CCPD building. The blue lightning was already retreating into a closing slit of sky. Joe was running out of the precinct doors with his weapon drawn, drawing on a man who was no longer there.
Barry's ear was against cold concrete.
Joe's voice was a long way off.
He thought, very clearly: That was Jay's frequency.
Then he thought nothing for a while.
---
[HARRY]
I got the call at 3:11 PM.
Cisco's voice. Tight. Get to STAR Labs. Now.
I was driving when the news radio caught up to it. Reports of an attack in the downtown core — and I knew before the next sentence finished what the attack had been. I pulled over, sat in the car for ten seconds with my forehead on the steering wheel, and then put it back in gear and drove the rest of the way at the limit because flooring it would have been a story I didn't want to tell to a traffic cop.
The med bay was a wall of people when I got there.
Iris was in the chair by the bed with both her hands wrapped around one of Barry's. Her makeup had run. She wasn't crying anymore — she'd reached the point in the night where the body shuts that down to conserve fluid.
Joe was standing at the foot of the gurney with his back to the room. His shoulders were locked.
Caitlin was at the head of the bed. She had the calm of a doctor working, which I'd come to recognize as the calm she put on when she did not have any other calm available. Her hands were doing things to wires and IV lines that I didn't follow.
Cisco was at the door with a tablet, taking the press feed, scrolling.
Barry was on the gurney.
His eyes were open. Unfocused. He was breathing. The monitors said most of his vitals were okay. The shape of him under the sheet from the waist down wasn't right.
I stopped in the doorway.
"How bad," I said quietly.
Caitlin didn't look up. "T-7 fracture. T-9 fracture. Bruising along the lumbar. He's a speedster. Eight to ten days, he walks. Two weeks, maybe three, he runs. Slower."
"Anything I can do."
"No."
"Okay."
I looked at Barry. He looked back at me. Long delay. Recognition arriving slow.
"Harry," he said. The voice was a whisper. "Was it —"
"Don't talk yet."
"It was —"
"I know."
His eyes closed.
I stepped back into the corridor.
Jay was in the corridor.
Standing with his back against the wall, hands in his pockets, head bowed. The picture of a man receiving terrible news. There was actual moisture in his eyes when he looked up at me.
"They told me," he said. His voice was tight. "I came as soon as I could. Is he —"
"He's stable."
"Thank God."
"Yeah."
I didn't move.
I'd run a list in the car on the way over. A list of things I could not do. I could not punch Jay Garrick in the throat in this corridor. I could not say his real name in the hearing of Caitlin and Joe and Iris. I could not even look at him in a way that exceeded the look you'd give a friend of a friend who was visibly upset about a mutual loved one in a hospital bed.
I gave him the look I would have given a friend of a friend.
He nodded. Pulled himself off the wall. Walked toward the med bay.
He went inside.
He sat on the second stool by Barry's bed and reached out and put his hand briefly on Barry's wrist.
I watched him do it through the observation window.
The wrist of the man whose spine he'd just folded over his knee for the cameras.
[Target re-assessed.]
[Designation: Zoom. Tier: SS.]
[Extraction viability — current Rank D / fused B: Impossible.]
[Recommendation: Wait.]
I closed the System.
Walked to the stairwell.
Took the stairs to the roof. Sat on the AC unit with my elbows on my knees and looked at the city for an hour. Watched the news helicopters circle the CCPD building four blocks away. Watched the cameras on the ground point at a smear of blood that they were going to put on every channel by sunset.
The monster was playing with its food.
I knew what that looked like. I'd done it.
The difference was a question I didn't want to look at and stayed up there with anyway until the sun was lower than the buildings and somebody downstairs needed me to go pick up dinner for the family that wouldn't leave Barry's room.
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